


I Never Told You What I Do For A Living

by thankyouandyou



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Cyberpunk, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-01-04
Packaged: 2017-11-23 15:37:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/623743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thankyouandyou/pseuds/thankyouandyou
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Louis is a) a Steinbeck fan, b) not Harry's mother, c) an android, or d) all of the above.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Never Told You What I Do For A Living

**Author's Note:**

> An unfortunate cyberpunk AU by a person that shouldn't be allowed anywhere near cyberpunk AUs because really she lives in a blanket cave and can't tell a laptop from a toaster.

Harry is lying on the table, arms dangling off the edge. His long long legs are still very long, boots resting on the floor like this is a comfortable way to be, on your back on the kitchen table with a light over your head flashing in your eyes like a third degree interrogation.

Louis walks in for a drink of water, perhaps something sugary afterwards to take away the taste of copper.

He pauses at the sight of Harry, flopped on the table like a dead fish. 

"Didn’t hear you come in", he says. Harry slides an arm over his face, slowly until his eyes disappear into the crook of his elbow. there’s blood under his fingernails. Hours old, judging by the color. Harry’s, by a 60% chance.

"Perhaps I didn’t want you to," he drawls, and it’s worse when he’s like this, hurt or tired or lying down, it takes ages for the words to leave his mouth. 

Louis walks to the sink and runs the tap until the water goes clear. He leans down and opens his mouth around the steady stream of lukewarm water, tasting rust and dirt. He makes a face, surprising himself. he reminds himself that the metallic taste is something he’s choosing, it wouldn’t take much to make it go away once and for all. also, grimaces are unbecoming.

He schools his face into a neutral expression and tells Harry that if he really wanted to be left alone he shouldn’t have come back, he should have hot-wired a car and driven for around eight hours straight, heading north, only then would Louis have a bit of trouble locating him.

"Bonus points if i go underground, in a really crowded space, right?" Harry asks, arching an eyebrow. 

"This is not a videogame. There are no points." Louis berates. Then he nods. "A tube station would make it harder for me.’

Harry grins but his eyes are hidden so louis doesn’t have a surefire way of calculating the percentage of truth in that curve. People fake a lot of things with their mouths, but Louis finds that eyes are much more trustworthy, and Harry’s eyes are like math.

He wonders if Harry would like to be told that, your eyes are like the pythagorean theorem. The geometry of your curls is like Liam’s half-assed homework, clumsy and unpredictable, occasionally lovely, that’s why I don’t trust them, that’s why I feel compelled to touch them.

He'd would like that, Louis inherently knows. Harry is a weird fuck.

"Does it taste like shit?" Harry asks, rough and minutes too late, long after louis has twisted the tap shut. "It must taste like shit, it's been raining. Sometimes mud gets in." 

"Why are you on the kitchen table’ Louis asks in lieu of an answer, and turns around to open the cupboard over his head. He takes out a packet of strawberry flavoring and taps it against his wrist, forcing its contents to gather away from where he’s supposed to rip it open.

Harry groans and moves his spine in a nearly reptilian way, he undulates. His left foot lifts a little off the ground and touches back down again.

 "Nearly broke my back, you shit." 

His bones are making soft noises, pop pop clack _snap_ , and Louis closes his eyes to listen out for some more serious injury, a thing that will stand out, the pulse of internal bleeding.

"Stop trying to hear my hurts, Louis,’ Harry grunts, no real heat behind it. "Ask me where the pain lives and fucking lick it better, you dick, you fucking left me out there." \

Louis sighs as he turns away to inspects the mugs they keep on the counter. He singles out the one least likely to have been used by Zayn as an ashtray, and fills it with water from the tap. He sighs again. He enjoys sighing, he thinks. At first he didn’t understand the point or the impulse, but five years ago Liam was butchering, _butchering_  Márquez in the unique way only he can, and Louis let out the deepest breath and Liam startled and beamed and nearly kissed him, laughing with his eyes squeezed shut, said there you go, this is called ‘exasperation’.

Louis is not exasperated right now. Actually, he's pretty calm. He just likes letting air out of his lungs, but doing it a third time would be excessive. He rests his hip against the filthy counter, tears the packet open with his teeth and dumps the powder in the water. He stirs with his fingers. Harry’s got his eyes covered, he won’t see. What’s odd is the certainty that Harry won’t mind, and even stranger is the knowledge that he considers this thing normal. He likes biting Louis’ fingers. 

"It’s me they want,’ Louis tells him, after a few moments of dull, empty silence. Harry's heart is thumping rather loudly in its cavity, but not in a way that translates into anything more than exertion and residual fear. It takes some time for the human heart to recover after a near-death experience, and Harry fears. Louis tends to forget that. Louis fears too, he just has a higher threshold. It takes longer for him to reach his peak. He still remembers the day Harry and Zayn’s possibility of survival fell below 15.6 % and Louis’ surroundings lost all sense of symmetry, everything started to melt into Dalí shapes and every word Niall said to him was spelt in runes.

Today, Harry's survival stats looked just fine.

 "There is no point in lagging behind for you when they’ll probably go right past you and keep chasing me."

"Bollocks. Dickface."

Louis enjoys the name-calling. It’s part of his character, he thinks. It’s part of the inner workings of our relationship, Harry had said that one time. Louis had quirked an eyebrow (a move he learnt in year twelve) _relationship, Harold_? Harry had rolled onto his stomach and spoke into the mattress without even opening his eyes, yeah, you almost blow yourself to bits covering me from the blast, you lose an eye and half your face, you don’t let me out of your sight for days and you use my full name when you’re trying to be condescending. No, my bad, this isn’t a relationship, we’re clearly business partners.

Louis leaves the mug next to Harry’s face and taps it on the side with a fingernail.

 "Strawberry water pour le garçon délicat who can’t possibly abuse his pallet like the rest of us."

 Harry moves his hand a little and peeks at louis with one eye. He’s frowning.

 "Fuck you with an icepick, Louis." 

Louis grins, "Bless you, sweet child," then pulls up a chair and positions himself next to Harry’s left knee. There’s blood on his trousers but no tear, which is good because Louis wouldn’t want to see them go, Harry’s ass looks phenomenal in those jeans. His boots are clear of blood but covered in brick dust, Harry’s been a smart boy, taking the long way back through the construction sites.

Those fucking boots, Louis thinks. Fourteen months and Louis still wants them- impressive, considering how easily he grows tired of things. He’s not alarmed. Want is nice. It’s like his chipped nails and the blisters on his feet; a reassuring reminder that he is a genius creation, a complex thing. What’s not as reassuring is the want for _Harry_ to keep owning and wearing them which is completely overthrowing Louis’ want to have them for himself. It’s absurd, it's illogical, but Louis has learnt to live with it. He’s adaptable.

And if it's bad, if it's the first signs of malfunction, Harry's to blame. It’s Harry’s fault, every glitch in Louis’ system. He did a number on it the first time he showed his face, and Louis was never the same since. When he's is in the right kind of mood, at night when everyone’s sleeping and he’s keeping watch or patching up his circuits, he likes picking through his memory drive. He likes bringing back the confusion, the symphony of warnings that went off when Harry first walked in, late for English Lit but still moving slow to slump in the back row, looking too young to be in college, disheveled like he was being attacked by merciless winds every time people’s backs were turned.

It wasn’t a nice feeling then, and it’s not particularly pleasant even now, but what can he say, Louis likes the thrill. And the threat. How all his alarms went off, warning for, warning for, ATTENTION, how his brain was tripping over itself to analyse the information, trying to take in Harry and take him apart, make him simple. He’s known from the start, Harry is a virus. Within the first fifty minutes of listening to him ramble his way through Grapes Of Wrath, mumbling fever-eyed and passionate about things that weren’t in the textbooks, that Louis hadn’t heard before in his life - _Louis_ , who’s read everything, who has it all stored in his memory- he’d made up his mind that whoever that kid was, he had to kiss him or kill him. It wasn’t that difficult a call to make.

It didn’t entirely work as planned, in the end. Try to attack him with a switchblade and you’ll find that under all that hair Harry’s keeping two black belts and an impressive skill at handling knives.

After their first battle royale in the cafeteria after dark, Louis was forced to repair his cooling system. He also found out that Harry doesn’t bruise easily. Louis’ fists barely left a mark.

The side of Harry’s face is badly bruised now, one of his eyes swelling shut. Whoever hit him must have used a lot of force. It can’t have been a fist either. An object, from the shape of it. The edge of a boot.

Louis is no longer calm. He feels angry. It’s warm and. He likes it. He keeps it. It might be of use later.

"Drink your water," he says, resting his chin on top of Harry’s injured knee. Harry hisses. Louis likes that sound. It reminds him of sex and fried eggs and minor electrical shocks. 

He doesn’t move away. He can hear Harry swallowing. One, two, three, three and a half. He shouldn’t be drinking lying down like this, but Louis isn’t his mother. He can tell he doesn’t drink all the water either, but ¾ is enough, and Louis is still not his mother. 

‘I fell down three floors’, Harry says in that tone of voice that Louis has learnt to identify as whining. 

‘To the _ground_.’

Louis huffs, rubs his chin against the denim.

"I made sure you were breathing, conscious, no bones were broken and your spine wasn’t injured."

"And then you ran away."

"And then I ran away.’

Harry raises himself on his elbows, shooting Louis a grinning surprised/amused/annoyed look through his one uninjured eye. this, Louis has learnt, is also exasperation, but of a different sort. Liam looks at zayn like that sometimes, especially in the early mornings, or when he’s stitching him up and zayn can’t stop complaining. If he had a habit of using words metaphorically, Louis would call this a sweet exasperation. It’s a choice of words that would make Liam proud and gushy, and that’s why he’s never to know. 

"What were my survival stats then, freak?" Harry asks, and Louis replies automatically because he’s been waiting for that question: "5.5% chance they’d take the time to kill you, 14.4% that they’d give you a beating, 65.6% that they’d just ignore you and keep going after the main prey. The odds were in your favor. Congratulations, you’re insignificant."

"They did kick me around a bit," harry mumbles with an petulant tone to his voice. He wants to be coddled. That’s not Louis’ job. Well, he wouldn’t call it a job.

"Gave me a black eye ‘n’ all."

"And a bit of a concussion," Louis adds.

 "A wee bit.’ Harry pokes Louis’ cheek with his knee. His eyes –his _eye_ \- is only slightly unfocused. "Will you still love me with my brains all leaking out?"

Louis laughs. daring, he thinks. And concussed, he reminds himself. He looks up at Harry’s face and even from such an odd angle, with his swelling eye stained bloody and the soft skin under the socket turning dark and darker, red on his temple and over his ear from where he split his skin, and the flesh under his chin rubbed raw, there’s no denying what he sees.

 "You’re still the fairest of them all," Louis tells him.

 Harry gives him the finger. His knuckles are torn. "You just want me for my boots," he says, forlorn. Louis gives him a grin, and Harry lies back down with a groan and a series of small cracks.

"There’s no denying that," Louis says, a little late, and Harry chuckles, tired.

Louis presses his mouth to Harry’s leg, right where the fabric’s wet. It’s not a kiss, because this is a knee, not a mouth, but Harry keeps saying that it doesn’t matter where you kiss, it’s always a kiss, and sometimes he puts his lips to the arch of Louis’ foot.

Louis leaves his mouth there for a while. The room goes quiet, and Louis really should keep Harry from falling asleep and dying. He could tell him about the equations in his eyes. The heimlich maneuver that is Harry’s knees locking around his waist. That would tickle his ego. Keep him interested.

Louis’ lips must be red now, stained with liquid Harry. His mouth tastes like old pennies and old pipes and he reminds himself he chose this, the metallic taste of Harry’s blood in his mouth, and he could stop it once and for all, if he wanted to. 

He does not.

"Stay awake,’ he says. "I want to talk to you about science."

 


End file.
